>> ETHAN: Thanks, everybody. Welcome. Thank you all for coming out
today's Media Lab talks. Our event today is called Undocumented
Students: Equal Access to Higher Education and Freedom University
Georgia. We are incredibly lucky to have a great group of people here.
My name is Ethan Zuckerman. I teach here at the MIT media lab, and
I'll tell you a little bit more about the event in a moment. But I want to
go down the line and introduce you to some of the friends that we're
really happy to have here. Right next to me is Bethany Moreton. She's
one of the Freedom University founders. She's also a professor of
history at Dartmouth. We've got Betina Kaplan, also a Freedom
University founder and associate professor of Spanish at the University
of Georgia. Going further down, we have Keish Kim. She's a PhD
student at Harvard. She works with PUSH, which is Protect
Undocumented Students at Harvard. Going further down, we have
Gustavo Madrigal. He is one of the founding students of Freedom
University Georgia, and he is an immigration paralegal and also an
immigration activist. And then our end, we've got Pamela Voekel, who's
a Freedom University founder, associate professor of history at
Dartmouth. Did I roughly get everyone’s names and affiliations? OK.
Awesome! That’s the main thing I have to accomplish here. But I also
have to tell you ground rules of what’s going on here. We have an event
that is here, live in this space, but it's also being recorded. It's also
being streamed live out on the web. People who are watching it are
going to be tweeting at #mltalks. If you see me playing on my phone, it
is not that you are not interesting. It is that I am trying to figure out
what people are saying on the web and bringing them into the
conversation as well. That's part of my job as well. This is the first of
two events. We have the live event here. We're all going to have a
smaller event, which is entirely off the record and that is going to be in
the civic media space that immediately follows after this. And so, that's
an opportunity for people who aren't comfortable being on-stage, or
may have questions or things that they want to talk about that they
don't want broadcast out to the rest of the world. And we have a space
for that as well. But our conversation here is really about three
subjects. It starts with the disobedience prize, which you saw launched
here at the media this past summer. That was an attempt to show
some of the exciting things there are happening around pro-social
disobedience. We ended up honoring four winners of that award. One
of those four winner was Freedom University Georgia. We have five of
the founders who were involved with that on-stage with me today. And
this is going to be an opportunity for us to talk about what Freedom
University Georgia has been trying to accomplish, but really around this
larger question of undocumented students, access to education, and
transforming the educational system so that more people have access
to higher education at places like the University of Georgia and also
places like MIT, and we're going to end up talking a little bit about what
MIT has been doing around these issues for good or for ill, as well. So,
before we jump in and start by putting some of students and some of
the professors on the spot, I'm wondering if we can go to this video, and
this is a trailer for a documentary that has been documenting what's
been going on with Freedom University Georgia. So, if we can go to that,
that would be great.
>> Why is this backwards?
>> Hello, Nathan -- we are on the plane. We're about to take off.
[Music.]
>> Ask for her phone number.
>> No. You didn't ask me. You friend asked me.
>> I actually said my friend?
>> Yeah. That was childish.
>> So, we were like, "Nah."
[Woman laughing.]
[Music.]
>> My dream is to be an astronaut, but.
>> He's stuck with a third-grade dream.
>> No, I'm not. All right. OK.
[Music.]
>> I got an education. I graduated. I've been really lucky.
So, there's never really been any obstacles, and so now then,
I want to go to college.
[Music.]
>> I'm a very smart student. I can mess around a lot, but I'm very smart,
but yet I'm here working, wasting my life.
[Music.]
>> My grandmother will always tell me to be careful enough.
If someone was to ask me, "Are you illegal?" to say that I was a
citizen, that I was born here.
[Sirens.]
>> My mom got stopped. The cop pulled us over and
found that she didn't have a license, and he said that he had to take her in.
>> Like, what's the point? I'm going to make it here.
They don't want me here.
>> We are involved on a war on terror, and after all, these are undocumented.
That's the point, really. We don't know who a lot of these people are.
>> There are people purposely out to make your day miserable,
make your life less.
>> We're number one. We're number one. We're number one.
>> Let me tell you, when I received DACA, I took a risk, not only for me, but for my family.
>> They knew my address, so to say that they don't know who we are, it's a lie.
>> One, two, three. Undocumented!
>> I'm not leaving until they come and get me.
>> I'm a Georgia boy. All I've ever known is Georgia. I don't really want to leave.
[Chanting.]
>> People united. We'll never be defeated.
>> I'm not scared. Like, I'm just not. Now, we just fight harder,
and we fight smarter, and we fight as one.
[Music.]
>> ETHAN: So, we're having this conversation here at MIT
at a very interesting and very fraught moment in time.
We have a group of people in the United States who have
grown up in this country, have gone to school in this country,
who, in many cases, don't know their citizenship status until
they're in the process of applying to college, or sometimes in the
process of looking for financial aid. We had limited protection for
undocumented people in this country under DACA. Through some
political machinations, we are now in a state where DACA is no longer
on the books. It's suspended, and there are now negotiations
happening between the president and Congress over the future of
undocumented people we've arrived in this country, as children, who
through no personal decision of their own, find themselves in a
situation where they're undocumented. And, as educator this country,
this is an enormous sort of moral and practical challenge. How do we
provide the education to students who want the chance to learn but
who don't have the paperwork, don't have the rights in some states to
go and attend those state universities? And, so, my friends who's been
involved with Freedom University Georgia have been very insistent that
we center this conversation on the experience of students who found
themselves, like the students in the video, looking at the situations, sort
of deciding how do you go further? And so, Gustavo Madrigal, I'm
hoping that you might help us and sort of talk about your experience as a
student and how that ended up sort of informing Freedom University Georgia.
>> GUSTAVO: Yeah, so thank you so much. And I guess I
really have to start at the end of my junior year and going to my senior
year. So, at the end of my junior year, I thought that I was going to go to
college with my friends and that I was going to use the Hope Scholarship,
which is a state scholarship in Georgia to be able to pay tuition.
Then, I found out through talks with my counselor that I was not
going to be eligible for the Hope Scholarship, and that I think, I
remember just sort of being in the room with her and then she stopped
beating around the bush and just straight up asked me, "Are you illegal?"
and I said, "Yes," and I didn't know exactly what that meant, right, at the
time. I knew that I wasn't documented in some way, but I really didn't
know what the extent of that was until I found out that I wasn't going to
be able to go to college, just like I had planned with my friends. And,
you know, at the end of my junior year, I had a 3.9 GPA which went down
to a 3.3 by the end of my senior year because my senior year, I didn't
really care anymore. I saw no point of, you know, keeping the work that
I had been doing going. And so, I sort of just stopped. Then, I
graduated and then, in September of 2009, I had a very, very bad car
accident. And when I came back I thought, "OK. Is this really what life
is going to be now? Is this really who I want to be? Do I want to give up
on trying to go to college?" And back then, I didn't know. Right? I didn't
know that just like me, there were hundreds of thousands. There were
millions of people in the same situation, and it wasn't until after that car
accident, when I was recovering, I was stuck at home, I didn't know
what to do. I couldn't work, which was the main thing keeping me going
then, and so I did a search for illegal students on Google, and the first
thing that came up was an article on the Dream Act and then a small
portal on the web that was a meeting place for undocumented youth
from all over the country. And that's sort of when I started getting
involved with the activism that was happening in Atlanta and back then,
the group was called The Georgia Dreamers, and I started getting
involved with them because what they were doing is they were trying to
mobilize as many people for the Dream Act as possible. And then in
late 2010, we actually were able to push the Dream Act up for a vote,
and we got a vote, and then it failed. It passed the House, but it didn't
pass the Senate. And that was, I think of lot of us credit it to five
Democrats who decided to vote against it and killed it by voting against it.
And so, I remember then, there was this anxiety within the youth
were a part of the Georgia Dreamers. And that anxiety was, "Can we do
what we think is the most important work without having any
limitations placed upon that work from, you know, an organization that
we're a part of them?" And we decided that yes, we could do that, but
that it would require having a different group. It would require having a
different structure. And it would require having accountability to each
other. And then, so after 2011, the Dream Act, you know, in 2011, we
decided that the fight was no longer at the federal level, so it wasn't
anymore about trying to push the Dream Act at the federal level
because we were fighting against many things, but, specifically, in
Georgia, we were fighting against HB 87, and that is like the SB 1070
copycat law that passed in Georgia, and those laws are still in the
courts, so at any point, you know, within the next few years, we could
see a decision that says HB 87, SB 1070, these are all legals. Right?
So, these horrible, horrible laws might actually be enforced, and so we
were also fighting secure communities and HB 87, which were these
programs where local law enforcement cooperates with immigration
customs enforcement to try to streamline that process of deportation
for as many people as possible, who end up being booked into local police stations.
>> ETHAN: And HB 87 was a law that could essentially require
all local law enforcement to essentially act as immigration
officials and demand to see people's papers. So, obviously, incredibly
threatening to any undocumented population. When these laws came
around, were you at school at this point? What had happened to you
after high school? You got involved with Dream activism. Where had
you wanted to go to college? Were you planning on going to the University of Georgia?
>> GUSTAVO: Not the University of Georgia. I was planning to go to Kennesaw State University,
and I actually was no longer in school when I started getting involved.
I graduated high school in 2009, and 2009 is when I had my accident,
and sort of that's where it all began.
But while I was fighting these laws, while we were fighting these
laws, I was no longer in school, and so, that definitely was
a protection that you lose once you graduate high school. Right?
You're no longer a student. You're just another adult who's
undocumented, and who's vulnerable.
>> ETHAN: And what are the laws in Georgia as far as attending a
state university as an undocumented student?
>> GUSTAVO: Well, so, as we were fighting HB 87,
as we were fighting s-com, secure communities, and what is the other one?
287G. Yeah. The ban came. There's too many things. But,
yeah, then the ban came down, which said that undocumented students
could not attend the top-five research universities in the State of Georgia,
and it also included language that said that any college, any
public school in the State of Georgia that had rejected a qualified
applicant, and for the purposes of this ban, qualified meant someone
with lawful status or a US citizen, that any institution that had rejected a
qualified applicant in the last two years could no longer accept
undocumented students. Now, undocumented students not only
couldn't really go to these top-five universities, but also the ban was
created so that it could spread out, right? And, you know, we couldn't
pay in-state tuition. We couldn't pay out-of-state tuition. We had to pay
international rates, which are four times higher than in-state tuition.
And so that's sort of where, you know, the fight turned away from, well
not away because we were still trying to fight secure communities,
287G, HB 87, but then it opened up another front, which was the educational front.
>> ETHAN: So, here's a law in Georgia that is significantly more
restrictive than a lot of states. A lot of states have essentially said,
"For undocumented students, we can't give you in-state tuition, but you can pay
out-of-state tuition." In Georgia, you've gone even further and essentially said,
"If you can get in, you'll be paying the international tuition,
a much higher rate, but beyond that, you're not
admitted to the top-five research universities in the state, and for the
rest of the universities in the state, if they have rejected anyone in the
last two years, you are not allowed admission, because you might be
taking that slot from an otherwise rejected student." What did you
yourself find yourself doing at this point? You're already at this point an
activist. You're already working against HB 87 and then these other
laws that are on the books. But I know the end of the story. You're a
paralegal. You're an immigration advocate. Did you get to go to college?
How did this end up happening?
>> GUSTAVO: Yeah, so, I did end up going to college.
So, what we were fighting these things, the idea for
Freedom University was born, I think within the professors who
are here, and Keish and, you know, a bigger group of people, and at that
time, the group that we had decided to create so we could be
accountable to ourselves and not to some higher power, right, that
could dictate. What we did was called the Georgia Undocumented
Youth Alliance or GUYA, and then, I mean I think then that's sort of when
the professors and the groups linked up, right, and the idea for Freedom
University become a reality. And, for me, at least, it was going through
Freedom University and learning about these resources and learning
about the fact that, you know, while I was no longer in school, I had
been out of school for years, and I had so lost hope, right, that I could
continue, that I could try to do this, that having this team of people
behind me and working with me would help me and, eventually, I ended
up getting a full ride to Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts,
and that's how I was about to go to college. If it wasn't for the people
here in Georgia who couldn't be here, I remember one, it was 4 AM in
November of 2011. She called me up, and I was still half-asleep, and
she asked me, "Have you applied to any places?" And I said, "I haven't."
And she just, she went off on me, and she was like, "No. No. No. I
need you to get up. I need to to start applying. I need you to start
writing the essays. And, you know, at 5, I want you to send me essay
that you wrote so that we can edit them and then you can continue
writing them." And so, that kind of push, right. I mean, that's the kind
of push that we also needed because we were so focused on all these
things that we had to push back against that we forgot to push
ourselves towards the goal that we wanted to attain that I think at that
point became this abstract idea of if we can manage to get to a good
point here, I might be able to go to school, but now, it's more for the people who are on their way.
>> ETHAN: So you saw yourself needing to win the movement first
and then have that opportunity, and actually one of the things that
Freedom University helped you do was sort of go from not being able to
going to one of the most selective liberal arts colleges in the nation,
now finding yourself sort of committed in the longer term here.
Keish, can you talk about your story, about sort of how you got involved with this as well?
And then, I want to talk to the professors about how they
ended up sort of meeting the other side of this equation.
>> KEISH: Right. No. I think Gustavo did an amazing job laying out sort of the all the outside
forces that was making us feel and being you know sort of
stuck in a certain type of social and political space. Right?
So, I was in a very, very similar space. I had always
known that I was sort of undocumented, not really knowing the
repercussions of it until it was college time, which a lot of the stories
often go is when students are trying to obtain higher education or there
are other stories about the driver’s licenses things. Right? Trying to
access just day-to-day like livelihood that we sort of meet these barriers
and realize that we cannot have those access. So, I was very similar in
that trajectory. I had went into my counselor, my guidance counselor in
Georgia, trying to figure out how I can go to school. How can I afford
school? And his answer was that I couldn't, or he doesn't really
understand what should be done. So, I did my own route. I applied to
several state schools. I applied to all the schools that my friends were
applying to UGA, University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia State,
a bunch of all the colleges around. I applied to a few out-of-state for
some reason. I applied to Auburn. I applied to Emory. So, that was a
private university. But it ended up being down, going down to the cost.
So, how can your family who are also undocumented and working under
the table 9-5, or even more hours, multiple shift, multiple jobs for low pay,
to afford an international rate, which is like what, $50,000, $60,000 a year? I couldn't.
>> ETHAN: Yeah.
>> KEISH: So, my frustration.
>> No access to loans.
>> KEISH: No. No access to loans. So, you needed a US citizen to
sort of like guarantee and be a benefactor and be a cosigner.
As an undocumented person, who do you have access that can be a cosigner to a $120,000 loan?
>> ETHAN: Nobody.
>> KEISH: Nobody. Even with papers. Even as a citizen.
So, I met that barrier. I also graduated in 2009, and I went into a bad place where
1, I couldn't get a job. I was helping my parents. I was working at a flea
market. I was frustrated. I was really scared. I felt that my parents'
whole reasoning coming to the US was sort of down the drain, and that
was a lot of burden that I carried on my part. I was naive. I was
determined to go to school, so I started doing solo studying, which,
looking back now, wasn't very effective. But I tried to redo the SATs. I
tried to read more. I tried to do all these test preps on my own for a
year-and-a-half until I started organizing. It was not a good place to be.
And the whole premise on that, for me was, you know, once in a while
you'll see in your local ethnic newspaper, so mine is Korean, Korean
newspapers about success stories of like students who didn't have
papers but went into Harvard or went into some super-prestigious
school and got a full funding, and I think that was my ultimate goal.
Yeah, but that's not sustainable. So, I also reached out to a national
organizer. I think at that time it was Perla Law who was undocumented
at that time, who is doing amazing work as in UC Berkeley being the
legal counselor and staff attorney there or was. And I reached out to
them and was like, "Hey. I'm undocumented." Or at that time, we would
use the word illegal. I used the word illegal. I was like, "I'm illegal. I
need, I want to go to school. I need to go to school. Can you help me?"
And they had connected me to a fellow organizer and comrade,
Georgina, who was a stronghold in Georgia, and that's when I had gone
to the first meeting that led up to being the Georgia Undocumented
Youth Alliance GUYA. Yeah - and how we got involved with Freedom U, I
think it was in culmination of everything. Right? With HB 87, with policy
416, with all this legal pressure that's happening, with a lot of students
getting arrested, a lot of students being detained, putting in deportation
proceedings, and we were fighting. We were trying to fight them.
Right? That the professors were also concerned about their own
students that were around them that were certainly getting pressured to
1 scope out and then 2 like kick out. Or one, they lost funding. Right?
Because of policy 416, the institution started figuring out who were
undocumented and started requesting funding. Right? They need to
pay certain bills, and they had reached out to GUYA to ask for some advice. Right?
>> ETHAN: So this had literally affected people who were in school
at that point for whom tuition might go up by a factor of 4.
>> KEISH: Yeah.
>> ETHAN: Because suddenly, their citizenship status became
critical as far as how it was going. For you, you were not in school,
but you were starting to get involved with the Undocumented Rights Movement
>> KEISH: Yes.
>> ETHAN: with the Dream Movement,
>> KEISH: Yes.
>> ETHAN: Let me now sort of bridge over to my friends who are teaching at University
of Georgia at this point, and I'm sort of curious how you sort of ended up meeting and
connecting at that point. So, maybe, Betina, if I can, can I go to you first on this?
>> BETINA: OK. OK. So, in 2010, when the resolution against,
the ban against undocumented students passed, many of us started
considering ways in which we could protest or oppose to the ban. At
that time, Pam and Bethany were already very well-connected, and they
can tell a little more. With students' organizations who were protesting
against the rates of tuition, and they were going up and the
scholarships were going down, were shrinking. So, there was a group
of students in UGA, mostly upper-division and graduate students who
were very engaged with access to higher education. In my department,
we had recently hired Lorgia García-Peña as the specialist in Latino studies.
>> The only one in the entire state, right?
>> BETINA: Most likely, yes.
[Laughing.]
>> BETINA: Now, it has changed a little bit, but at that time, yes.
And it was a long fight to get this position opened,
and there was a group of us within the department who were thinking
that the Latino student body was growing and that we were not offering
anything to them, so we were pushing for this to happen. We got it.
Lorgia was there. And then we have this horrible news that would
affect mostly, not only, but mostly Latino students. So, I remember
once talking to Lorgia in a corridor and saying, "What are we going to
do? This is affecting us. This is against us." And at the same time, I
think, Pam invited me to a meeting with students and community
members, and in that meeting, we just starting brainstorming on how to
react directly to this ban. I was following the student movement GUYA,
what they were doing. I was following in the news how young people
were putting themselves to arrest, and I felt horrible that I was a grown-up
person responsible for educating these people and was not doing
anything. So, at that point, we met and was a community member, Beth O,
who very naively said, “Well, you three are teachers.” We four. There
was someone else. “Why don’t you teach them? They cannot go to
college. Why don’t you teach them?”
And after that, we started thinking of options and toying with the idea
and, immediately, we decided that we couldn’t plan anything without
asking the students what their needs were and how this idea of teaching
a class would go with them, so that’s when we met with a group of GUYA
students, and Keish was there, and we decided that it was the way to go,
and we started as a protest and also as a way to support this group of students.
>> ETHAN: So, Pam, my understanding of this is that this wasn’t just a solidarity
actual. That was certainly a big piece of that, but it was also a very practical,
educational, how do we help students get to the point
where they can find the resources to find a school that’s willing
to accept them and that they can afford. How did this actually work? Did
you have a classroom? Did you meet? What did you teach? How did this work out?
>> PAM: Yeah. I remember that during these organizational meeting
Keish, in particular, and Gina, who she referenced really pushing
saying, "You know, what we want is to be in a college classroom." And, I
think, if I'm not misreading this, that GUYA was saying, "This would be
politically, incredibly useful to have this kind." And it did attract an
incredible amount of media. And, so, we taught that class, and because
of Lorgia García-Peña, we were able to offer a kind of Latinx studies
classes as well as Latin American literature and culture and US
immigration from a more or less Latinx kind of perspective or a broader
perspective, perhaps. And one thing became really clear and while we
were fight the ban, and while the students in the class were at the
absolute cutting edge of that fight, there were people like Gustavo and
Keish who had already graduated from high school two years before and
were really ready to go to college and wanted to do that. And what we
saw when we began to do things like SAT prep, we needed SAT prep
books, and so the level of solidarity nationally was amazing. Stacks and
stacks of books, not only for this American Studies Latinx Studies class
we were teaching, but also for SAT prep book. And then, the kind of
solidarity that came out of places that were actually under resourced like
Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, a historically black college and
university. There was an undocumented student there that went into the
admissions office and said, "You know, there's a lot more people like me
who are being banned across the South, especially in Georgia and South
Carolina. You need to open up these scholarships. You need to open up
the fellowships." And so, one of the biggest receiving institutions that we
found was one of the poorest colleges in the country. And the second
one that was really fabulous was Berea College, who in the 19th century
was one of the first colleges to integrate along racial lines and along
gender lines, and, in fact, in the 1920s, the Supreme Court came in and
shut that down and said, "You can't be integrated along racial lines." And
so, Berea stepped up and said, especially when DACA passed and people
were able to work, because it's a work-study school, that they were able
to provide scholarships. The alumni at Hampshire, led by a woman who
was herself a first-generation student, organized to come up with the
money for Gustavo's four-year scholarship. So, what we saw was a lot of
intense organizing and incredible solidarity coming from the HBCU,
coming from Berea, and coming from organizations in Athens, like that
we mentioned Betu who was the head of the Immigrant Rights
Organization, from the African American women who ran the Economic
Justice Coalition and already had networks, so this logistically to run
something like this, you need drivers. That's always the issue in social
movements in the South, right, is public transportation is non-existent. And so
we have these teams of drivers who are coming out of the
Economic Justice Coalition. We were receiving death threats from the Klan and
people like that, and so the Economic Justice Coalition provided
someone who was out in the parking lot while the students were meeting
on Sundays for these three-hour intensive classes to watch, you know,
and not to call the police, because that wouldn't do any good. Right? So,
we had our own kind of protection system out of these pre-existing
solidarity networks. And some of the people doing the driving were
Teamsters, people from the Racial Justice Action Center in Atlanta. There
were lawyers that came in from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the
Southern Center for Human Rights that took on some of these cases,
because some students with broken talk lights had police records, and
so if they're going to leave the state to go to college, that had to be
addressed in courtrooms and things. So, one of the interesting things
about Freedom U was this incredible level of solidarity form these
under resourced colleges and from these existing activist networks, I think.
>> ETHAN: So when we think of this as four professors got
together at an undisclosed location and held free classes for
undocumented students, we're seeing like the tip of an iceberg of
organizing that includes how do people get there? How do you protect
the people who are there? How do you think about this larger question of
what the goal is of this? And it sounded like, from very early on, the goal
was not an alternative to being able to go to a university. It was the
opportunity to get in there.
>> PAM: And you have to realize that the initial organizing act was this
Gina that Keish's been talking about. GUYA comes out and does
an organizing workshop for students in the Athens area, and Gina's first thing was,
"Everybody who's over 30, and everybody who is a citizen, out of the room."
And so they did the organizing. It was GUYA who was
pushing this and was doing the logistical work because,
you know, social movements are the reproductive labor. Right? And so
this was the group doing that labor and having that vision, I think, and
they were the ones who were connected to these activist networks and
Atlanta and things. And so, put together this, kind of took the befuddled
professors and said, "Now look. You know. This is what you need to do."
>> KEISH: I mean, I think that's real, because I think, I don't know about
you, Gustavo, but I think a lot of us, yeah you were too, jaded, and then
very jaded. And the aspect or perspective like going being in a classroom
or going to college was far from our mind. I think there's a reason Lorgia
had to you call at 4 AM, 5 AM and to ask you to write a paper and
application in an hour. Right? So, I think when even when Freedom
University, before even we actually like claimed and embraced that name,
we were just like, "What does this classroom actually look like? What is it
actually supposed to do?" And when we were using our networks to like
let the word out so that students actually were attending, and actually
taking up space for this classroom, there was a lot of hesitancy and
confusion of what this was supposed to be.
>> ETHAN: And, Keish, what did it end up being?
I mean, when people were coming to these classes, you know, what was getting taught?
Was it about doing a college-level class in Latinx and American Studies,
or was it about thinking about what it would mean to be
someone who was going into higher education?
>> KEISH: So there was a lot, I think in the beginning there was a lot of
confusion. It was very amorphous. There was a lot of questions. Right?
People were asking for all kinds of classes. For me, at that time, I was
very dead-set on like having an actual classroom, like a college-level
classroom was, what I personally wanted. And that was my personal
investment. So, at that, that's definitely shown through, that that was
what I needed. So, that's what we had stated.
[Laughing.]
>> Looking back now, I remember in our first meeting Keish was very eloquent,
and she said something like, "I have lost my personality as a student, and I
want to be a student." So, after that, in the class, she insisted
>> KEISH: Right.
>> that she was already, again a student. >> KEISH: Right. >> that was a big gain.
>> KEISH: Yeah. I mean, looking back now from where I
am now, it's really ironic and funny that there was a syllabus that was
being drafted and compiled over the summer. Like, just multiple drafts. I remember
>> 17 pages.
>> Keish: It was a very rigorous. It was actually a very rigorous. I still have it with me.
It was very rigorous.
>> Beyond graduate school.
>> KEISH: It was actually beyond graduate school. And now that I'm in it,
I know that it was beyond graduate school level.
[Laughing.]
>> KEISH: The funny thing was, and then it was a very, I think
a lot, even the naming of the classroom, even naming of Freedom University,
there was a lot of power and intention behind it. So, the
classroom, the class that was offered was titled as American Civilization,
and this was a little wink at Harvard American Civilization Program at
that time. We had then, since then, changed our name to American Studies.
We still have a lot of work to do.
[Laughing.]
>> KEISH: But the classroom, the syllabus and the syllabus in the class was titled
American Civilization, but what happened actually behind and inside the syllabus
was amazing, powerful critiques on empire, about statehood, sovereignty,
about, and I was using all kinds of scholarship and sources that as ethnic
studies. It was American studies at its core. We were reading. We were
really ready graduate-level readings. We were reading George Lipsitz. We
were reading Jorge Gonzalez. We were reading
>> ETHAN: May Nai
>> KEISH: May Nai. Right?
[Laughing.]
>> ETHAN: I see Bethany laughing hard about this,
and Bethany of course is an activist historian, has
thought a lot about labor history and about different social movement,
sort of within the Americas. How did you find yourself thinking about this
sort of going into the classroom? Were you approaching this as a
scholar? Were you approaching this as an activist? How were you bringing yourself into this?
>> PAM: Well, I mean I think what Betina said at the beginning.
I remember the day that we opened the New York Times
and there was the picture of GUYA activists who had sat down on the
street in front of the Georgia Capitol to protest these this spate of laws.
Right? And you see these young people in their graduation gowns, right,
from high school, sitting down and being dragged off by the same beefy
cops that we're all familiar with from 100 years of Southern iconography,
and the reaction is, "This is my institution that is now being directly
conscripted into this particular from of injustice. There has to be
something strategic that you can do with your own imbrication in the
committing of this injustice." And so, reaching out to the people who
were risking, and continue every day, every minute that they're up here, to
risk far more than any of us could risk, right, but doing this, and just
saying, "Is there any way in which our institutional location could be
useful, because none of us wants to participate in executing this
particular ban. Right?" And to put this in context, it was the 50th
anniversary of the desegregation of the University of Georgia. And so,
having fought that tooth and nail, right, the white state establishment at
the time was not patting itself on the back very publicly for the open
access to the plantation-style campus that was at the heart of this, and
so, using those realities, strategically, we wanted to know if the activists
who were, in fact, risking something, could see a use for that. Right? But
when Keish came back with, actually the thing that would be useful for us
would be if y'all would do this as a civil disobedience demonstration
project and actually do it like you would do it, you know. The fact was that
this fight against undocumented students and racialized students was
part of the whole move to ban an entire branch of knowledge from public
universities. Right? That while Arizona was passing these laws, that
Georgia was running along and copying, it was also trying to throw ethnic
studies out of its institutions of higher learning.
>> ETHAN: Right. So it wasn't accidental that Latinx studies was really a focus of this.
This was, in part, what you were trying to fight for.
>> PAM: Exactly. That American Studies and Latinx studies,
ethnic studies generally, African American studies,
these are all branches of human knowledge that had to, literally,
fight in the streets for inclusion in publicly-funded education. And so,
there's an awareness at the, in the room where these things happen that
that knowledge is dangerous. That knowledge, liberatory knowledge is
dangerous, and I think it's fair to say that no one in the class had
encountered the histories we were collectively constructing, presented in
any fashion. Right? That that is part of the move. And so for us, it was
really powerful to get to participate in that knowledge creation with
people who were actively liberating our country at the same time.
>> I want to say that one of the effects of having such a powerful ethnic
studies professor like Lorgia García-Peña was that not only did we have
the four of us teaching, we had people fly in. Marco Vermaier Velasquez,
Yolanda Martina Sambiel, Achio Vejas, I could go on and on, Laura Gutierrez,
flew in on their own dimes, oftentimes, to give classes at Freedom U,
so arguably, we had the best ethnicity studies curriculum at the time.
[Laughing.]
Frankly, you know, and without, you know, no budget,
essentially, when you're using sometimes the University of Georgia, but
these were, this was an intellectually just over the top stimulating kind of
experience to have this level. Junot Díaz, the famous Junot Díaz, MIT
professor, Skyped in, and Keish got up and sort of just went after him.
[Laughing.]
>> [Spanish.]
>> PAM: But you know, people were empowered and dialoguing
and this was really a magnet for like, you said, a kind of
demonstration project in liberatory knowledge
that lots of people wanted to participate in.
>> ETHAN: But I'm sure that, please, go ahead.
>> KEISH: Yeah, but I was a student. So, like, on the end of classroom, we
are just soaking it in. We don't, we're coming in because we have said and
dedicated our time into the space. We don't know at what scale we're
meeting these professors. Like, we don't know what their positions are,
where they are in their like legal, I mean scholarly genealogy. We do not
know these things. What we were promised, and this was a constant
push that we still have to do, is actually get it accredited. So, when it was
the idea was brewing, the importance was getting the classroom
accredited, so that if we were to, you know transfer or go to a two-year
college, a community college or even a four-year college, that the
experience in the classroom that we were actually sitting on was being
recognized as an actual class, which we didn't still. Right? We still
haven't. And that sort of morphed, and that push was happening while
the applications, like deadlines, were coming up, and we started then
really pitching ideas of, "OK. What does it mean for us to try to apply?
Because now that we have access to professors of a university, could
they write us recommendation letters? Could they do
this?" So these ideas were just forming as time went by.
>> ETHAN: So, there's an open question about could Freedom University
turn into something that could have accreditation, could help people get
credits that they might be able to transfer and bring somewhere else.
You've built this program, which even just in the first seminar,
is this sort of extraordinary Latinx Studies, and you're doing this
on Sunday mornings, completely with volunteer labor,
at an undisclosed location, so that the Klan, the fucking Klan,
doesn't show up to disrupt your activities. So, I assume the University of
Georgia was thrilled with this and was honoring the extra service.
[Laughing.]
>> ETHAN: I assume they got rid of some of your teaching
requirements for this, Bethany or Pam? I've noted that three of the four of
you are no longer teaching at the University of Georgia.
[Laughing.]
>> ETHAN: Betina, how did UGA react to this?
>> BETINA: At the beginning, especially with tests,
was trying to put us against each other, and they
would go to UGA speaker and ask them, "What do you have to say about
this?" And the answer that the speaker gave, the first answer was, "Our
faculty can teach whatever they want outside their schedule and some
professors teach Bible school, and we don't care about that.
>> PAM: Which is true.
>> BETINA: Which is true. So, they pretty much put it in
those terms and gave us, in a way freedom, so we didn't need to respond to that.
>> ETHAN: But that's not exactly wholeheartedly embracing. >>
Let's be clear. There was plenty of retaliation. But up next to what other
people had on the line, in the situation, it was not worth worrying about,
honestly. And I will say it's important to remember that the faculty at
University of Georgia, the student body at University of Georgia, same at
Georgia State, same at multiple other universities around the state,
Armstrong State, voted to resolutions against the ban in support of
Freedom U or other actions that deal with the larger immigrant
>> BETINA: All university councils, all university forums have at least one
resolution against the ban, where faculty were involved and students were involved.
>> ETHAN: and public.
>> PAM: An interesting thing was that the administration wouldn't go to the Board of Regents meetings and say these things, so there were the GUYA activists confronting the Board of Regents without,
with these sort of cowardly administrators not saying anything,
just sitting in the audience while younger people took on this fight.
>> BETINA: And when we have the discussion in UGA with the
university council, we proposed a resolution against the ban. We have a
very strong reaction against the language that we were using. In the first
proposal, we were using the word discrimination. And our colleagues
who were supporting Freedom University, who were against the ban, they
reacted very badly to the word discrimination. They couldn't tolerate that,
and luckily, we were able to change that language, and the resolution
passed. But I think that speaks a lot about the position of faculty, even
when they are supporters, how they do not want to make connections
with the past history of the state and that creates a lot of trouble for them.
>> PAM: Although a specialist, specifically, in the history of living
through segregation in Georgia, was one of our most effective
collaborators, who came and spoke and made those connections herself,
Barbara McCaskill, who runs a stand-alone project at UGA about the history of
anti-black discrimination at UGA had no trouble at all making those connections.
>> ETHAN: So, I want to open this up to the audience in a moment,
but I just want to ask one specific question to everyone, starting with Keish.
I know that everyone who's been involved with
Freedom University is both very proud of it, but also very insistent that it
is not the only intervention, maybe not always the right intervention, that
there's a need for a huge number of interventions to deal with these
questions of access to education. So, Keish, you're very involved with
PUSH at Harvard. Can you tell us a little about that? And then, I'd love to
just go sort of down the line and hear what each of you is involved with
right now, and maybe if there's anything you want to urge us as an
audience, both here and online to get involved with, and Pamela, when we
get to you, we'll pull up the website associated with you.
[Laughing.]
>> KEISH: I think Freedom University as well as GUYA are still both ongoing.
Things have gotten worse, right, in many ways? Both of us went into
different trajectories of different institutions, at academic institutions,
pursuing different interests, but I mean both of us haven't fixed our
statuses yet. And, you know, while our scale and our network of people
that we're interacting with and engage with are expanding, the core
issues and values are still the same. So, for me, currently being an
American Studies -- student at Harvard, after the recent elections, it was
actually again working closely with Lorgia García-Peña who's currently a
faculty there. It was her classroom where we met after. It was actually
one her, again, one of her amazing, powerful, undergraduate classrooms
that was being held Monday, Wednesday. So, on Monday, before the
election result, there was a very powerful performance, on-campus
performance of students sort of doing these murals and decorating the
John Harvard statue of just doing these really amazing and powerful
resistance acts. And then, we got the election result on Tuesday, went to
class, and I had went in to be with the students, and it was a very
sorrowful moment. One, we had to console each other and sort of
recognize each other's pain. And, secondly, that's when we started
writing, drafting a letter to our president and to our deans of what we
needed, and that sort of became what Protect Undocumented Students
at Harvard sort of became, and we have multiple fronts of ask, which still
have not been met, unfortunately, and that had to do with having an
actual, a physical location, an office that is above ground.
[Laughing.]
>> KEISH: That had actually invested money into students, protecting
undocumented students. This meant in multiple fronts. Now only
allocating funding to support of emergency financial aid, not only covers
DACA, but maybe other funds. Maybe our parents are being deported or
being detained and then deportation proceedings. Maybe we need to
help our parents sustain themselves because our mom and dads are
detained. Right? There's multiple fronts where financial need is actually
needed that people do not always recognize. There's always the $495 for
DACA manuals, but there is so much more that goes beyond that. What if
we had mixed that with a lot of the students were mixed status, or the
students themselves may have papers, but their parents, their brothers
and sisters who may not have papers? Right? So, our needs were not only
the funding. It was not only the legal need of having a very radical and
powerful and insistent and stubborn attorney, a criminal and both
immigration attorney who's capable of pushing certain envelopes, right,
and making certain things happen. We needed an attorney. We needed
multiple attorneys. We needed a collection of attorneys who's able to do
certain things. We wanted access to mental health. We wanted a capable
mental health counselor and therapist who's able to meet the needs of
not only LGBTQ, low-income, first-gen students, but knowing various
backgrounds of like what it means to be undocumented. So, these were
some of the fronts that we needed. We'll actually ask for more hiring of
ethnic studies professors and scholars. Multiple fronts were asked.
>> ETHAN: So, it's a huge set of needs, and just thinking about how
enormous these needs can be and how enormous these populations are,
I was reminded when we were sitting down over lunch, that not only do
we have the 800,000 people who've applied for DACA status or been
granted DACA status, we have 1.3 million people who are eligible. Since
DACA is not currently on the books, we have people who would be
eligible for DACA, but who are now, sort of falling through the cracks. And
then, as you are mentioning, you have an even larger set of students who
have mixed families, so that students have papers, one or both parents
doesn't have papers, and you find students in the a situation where, and I
find this as an educator, I have a student who will drop off the map, and
what may actually be going on is that its student is working full-time to
keep her parents from being deported or to figure out what to do with the
rest of the family if parents do end up getting deported. This whole set of
needs becomes something that, as educators, we have a responsibility to
address up 'til the point that our government finds a way to address this
better than they're currently addressing this now. Gustavo, what about
you? How are you involved with this at this point? Do you continue to be
involved with Freedom U? Are you involved with other parts of the
movement in New York at this point?
>> GUSTAVO: So, I'm not really involved with Freedom U anymore.
In terms of organizing efforts, I've taken a step back.
But, one of the motivations for when I first got involved
was if I'm going to go out, I'm going to go out with a bang. Right?
Like, I'm going to make some damage. I'm going to have an impact
before they take me out. And I think that has translated into my work as a
paralegal where I'm not necessarily working with people who are
highly-skilled workers. There is demand. Right? And they want to bring them over.
I'm working with people who are escaping, all kinds of violence, are
escaping poverty, are running away from these puppet governments that
the US installed and the sacking of the resources of their countries, and
they're coming here for a better life. Right? They just want to work as we
all do and lead a good life, and I think that that's sort of where it's
translated for me now. Right? There are so many immigration cases out there.
There's clean-cut ones where there's no criminal record. There's
ones that are very, very complicated, and those are the ones that I like to work on.
I like to work on the ones that anyone who could look at the
surface details of it and say, "No. Well, this is not someone we want in
this country," but it's not so black and white. Right? So, that's where I am now.
I eventually want to be an immigration attorney, and I want to keep
working on this project of, you know, like people have rights, and people
are eligible for immigration benefits under the INA. It may not be pretty. It
may not be easy. There's going to be a lot of digging, a lot of fighting, a
lot of advocating for people, but as someone who as of this point, doesn't
really have a, or doesn't have a path to legalization, my mentality is still, "I
want to go out with a bang." And what that means is that making sure
that as many people who can adjust, who can try to obtain legalization do
that and that's where my energies are now. And I think that eventually,
down the line, what I would like to do, and one of the biggest goals for
me is to be able to influence or write legislation that would go into the INA.
Right? That would be more humane and not just necessarily look at
people as what kind of economic contributions can you make to this country,
but what does this country owe you? What does this country owe your family?
How can we repay that? And that's sort of the impact that I want to have down the line.
>> ETHAN: There's a law school about two stops away on the red line.
I've got some friends over there. They often watch these events. So, they
may want to get in touch with you.
>> GUSTAVO: Let's talk after.
>> ETHAN: They do some pretty good work there.
Pamela, what about you? You're now up at Dartmouth College,
a noted hotbed of liberal activism.
What's your involvement with the movement at this point?
>> PAM: With Freedom U?
>> ETHAN: Yeah.
>> PAM: I've, like Gustavo, who's being too modest, I've helped a little bit
with tours of students coming through and doing educational work at places like
Smith and Hampshire. Gustavo actually organized a tour of
Freedom U students a couple years back in
the Pioneer Valley, and they were able to tell people what was going on.
Freedom U is ongoing. It's being run now by a woman named
Laura Emiko Soltis, who's an absolutely fabulous job, and Freedom U students
are sort of leading not only the undocumented student movement in
Atlanta, but are major leads in a larger kind of network of students
who've done is pretty powerful civil disobedience actions, not only at the
University of Georgia, but at the Board of Regents. And so, what we do at
Dartmouth, which is sort of a place that probably is not quite where MIT
is yet in terms of undocumented admissions, is educational work and a
lot of working with students whose parents are in deportation hearings
and getting professors to write letters that go to courtrooms in Georgia
or Nebraska or Texas or wherever it is that talk about that student so
that might give a judge pause kind of thing. But Freedom U is very much
an ongoing, you know, kind of ongoing concern and continues to offer
classes on Sundays and SAT prep, and I really want to encourage people
to go to the website.
>> ETHAN: And it's an organization that really could use your support,
and if we can just pull up the website here, great. And what's the URL for that?
>> PAM: I think it's www.freedomuniversitygeorgia.com or .org maybe.
There it is. There's MIT Professor Junot Díaz on the Colbert
Report giving his FU Georgia T-shirt, a sweatshirt.
>> ETHAN: I was going to ask whether the name was intentional, but I know Bethany well enough
to know that the name absolutely was intentional.
>> BETHANY: Yes, but all the students assumed that we had no idea, apparently.
Like, oh, those stupid adults.
[Laughing.]
>> ETHAN: But I've known you for a really, really, long time, and I know that FU Georgia
was something that was probably intentional.
>> We tried to argue that we wanted to be a freedom
school to come full-circle to the freedom schools
of the 60s, but everyone's like, "But if we're FU,
we get to shout 'FU Georgia' at the demonstrations."
>> Which was cathartic.
>> BETHANY: So anyways, I would really encourage people to, you know,
touch base them, to donate if you can.
As you know, most sort of donations to 501(c)3 organizations go to the
left coast and not to the South. Some of the most incredible political
activism is going on in the US South with absolutely no resources.
Taking students in a van to Berea College to interview there with
admissions officers is a $3,000 venture. $3,000 seems like nothing at a
place like MIT or Dartmouth, but it can go so far. Books, you know,
materials, artist materials for demonstrations, all of that, transportation,
getting people on a plane to get to Hampshire to do a workshop, so I
really want to encourage people if you can give to give. Share it on social
media, if you get connected with them. Volunteer if you're in the Atlanta area.
It really is, like we were saying, it's a social movement as much as it
is a single class on Sundays now. And it's a social movement that grew
with incredible solidarity with people from all over the country, people
flying in, people buying books, students organizing in Atlanta with GUYA.
>> ETHAN: I actually want to open up at this point before we lose some
of the wonderful guests that we have here, and we're going to keep
going on with this conversation both in a sort of open Q&A here. We're
also going to move into my space in Civic to keep talking a little bit
further on. But, let me just open this up a little bit. Anyone have anything
you want to ask these remarkable folks - the students, the professors, so
on and so forth?Don't leave me hanging her with the question cube. You
know how much I desperately want to throw this at people within the audience.
[Laughing.]
>> I thought it was some mic.
>> ETHAN: Thank you, Joy.
>> Thanks. Hi. I'm Joy. I'm part of the Center for Civic Media.
Earlier you mentioned that when you used the word discrimination, you
got push back from faculty, and in my own experiences of talking about
issues within institutions, language comes up so much in terms of what
people are willing to engage with. So I was 1, curious about how you
thought about the language based on the push back and what language
you would have wanted to use.
>> ETHAN: And I'm going to cheat just for a moment and brag on Joy for a second.
Joy is a PhD student in my lab and has been doing really
remarkable research demonstrating some in-built biases
in computer vision systems, and this work that gets very
tricky because it makes people uncomfortable. No one likes to be called
out on biases built into systems, but it's incredibly important to show
what these biases are so that people have a chance to address them
and make those systems better. So, language and how we talk about
this is something that's a big subject within our lab.
>> We were certainly aware that we had a limited number of
effective scripts available to us for the public leveraging of this,
and that one of them was, frankly, do-gooder,
befuddled white teacher just wants to help the kids get books.
That had an audience, and we talked a lot about the trade-offs involved
in playing to some of these scripts. The stand-and-deliver script that
says that there's a category of innocent, deserving, no fault of their own
immigrants who came here as children who are still effectively children
and, therefore, it's not their fault, and it contra-ed the sort of insistent
responsiblization, the illiberal narrative that whatever befalls you, you
have asked for it. "Here's one category of people," this narrative says,
"that we can point to and say OK, we'll give them special consideration.
Right? And they're real dangers." I think it's true, in general, that a lot of
the Dreamer Movement has been incredibly, ethically rigorous about
refusing that narrative and not throwing other undocumented
immigrants under the bus in pursuit of that particular. I think the problem
that it sounds like you're the expert on is how the technology of raceless
discrimination is specifically designed to make it impossible to call out
the elephant in the room. For me, it was very important that we spent
time with immigration history and looked at the ways that immigration
has been specifically structured around race. Everyone's been
completely aware of it at the time. The discussions in Congress are all
about how can we keep the country white, and yet not use the word race
in this legislation. And when they figure it out, they all pat each other on
the back, over and over again. 1924. 1952. 1965. They're thrilled that
they figured out a way to make sure that quote the unwashed Hottentots
will not be coming here to take jobs from good, wholesome Americans. I
think verbatim, right, out of the 65 debates. So, the challenge is
enormous to undo and refuse not leave any space for that kind of
deliberate erasure of what every knows is actually being talked about
here, and I don't think any of us has an answer on that. We would
probably be coming to you for guidance.
>> ETHAN: It's really interesting to think about the ways in which
Freedom University managed to position itself,
I think, very successfully as oh my God. Who could be
against, you know, college professors getting together on a Sunday.
>> The kids just want to learn.
>> ETHAN: And giving a chance for. You got me.
Right? I mean, we ended up supporting this through the
disobedience prize very much around that narrative. What's been so
great in sort of having you here and hearing about this is the ways in
which this was a student-led movement that essentially identified
something that students needed and wanted and then were sort of able
to go out and reach out to some professors who were willing to do it, but
it was the students identifying that this was a missing part of the
experience, a part of what people were being denied at that point in time.
>> BETINA: I would like to point out to another struggle that I think youth
movements also have and, we as organizers, organizers of
Freedom University, and now I'm in a different organization Ulead Athens.
We still have, and it's this idea of the good immigrant and the bad immigrant and
how these kids who want to come to MIT are the good immigrants, but
their parents or their younger siblings who did not pass the AP test is the
bad immigrant. So, I think from the perspective of the organizer or
coordinator of an organization that worked with undocumented
students, that is a big struggle, and I think Ulead Athens is working on
going around that, just by working with mixed status students and
working with the students who were the last ones in the classroom and
never had an advisor who said, "Yes. You're doing well."
We're going after particularly that student.
>> Because people shouldn't have to be as
extraordinary as these two people already were at 16 and 17 and 18 in
order simply to not wake up every day with this hang-up. God knows we
weren't. Right? This is not about finding just the hyper-qualified,
incredible stand-out human being and the people who built this
movement are very clear that it's not about that.
>> You do not need to be super-stellar to go to college.
>> Just to clarify, and you can add on, we weren't, I wasn't either.
The process of at least for me, I know my
process even more, my access to my undergraduate degree which was a
Syracuse University, another private institution, was actually a very
strong and powerful network of transnational feminists, trans-- poly--
there within the party who are pushing their administrators to open up a
private fund, a grant, a private grant. So, these are happening in multiple
levels. Right? We're not only pushing for policies against, like in the
public space. It's also happening back doors too. So like, it really, really
means a lot for like administrators, faculties to gather up a coalition to
come up with funding to support students if your institution doesn't
publicly allow undocumented students to come through, so just
recognizing that is really, really important, and advocating for students
who does not have the 4.0 GPA, who does not have the perfect SAT
score. I wasn't that student, but I had people who were advocating and advocating for me.
>> ETHAN: So, I'm going to come back to that question about
what universities can do around this, and I'm going to put
some of our friends from the admissions office on the spot, but let me
just give you a chance to ask a question here.
>> There's a warning label on the bottom of this that says I should read the user manual
before using it, and I want to be clear that I
haven't read the user manua l for the microphone box.
[Laughing.]
>> ETHAN: This is the media lab. None of us have ever read a user manual ever.
It's actually forbidden within >> They write the user manuals.
>> My name is Grif. I want to thank each of you for being here.
It's so clear that you have a lot to teach folks who are looking to
support undocumented students, but it's also clear, listening to each
of you that you have so much to teach folks working in higher education
and universities across the board, and listening to you speak
about the ways that learning needs to be found in solidarity with the
labor that it's supporting, learning through building relationships with
drivers, the way you talked about co-constructing curriculum, embracing
learning as a political act. You were mentioning earlier that you didn't
know where the professors were on their scholarly journey because they
were treating you like people. I mean, there's so much that you talked a
bout that just seems like every university in this country is failing at.
And so, I'd just like to hear from the perspective of faculty who have
been affiliated with big universities and also students who probably grew
up with an understanding of what university was. What are some of the
lessons that really every university should be trying to take from your experience?
>> ETHAN: Well, I'm actually going to merge that into a
question that I'm going to throw to my friend Jessica, which is I'm going
to ask her to just talk sort of briefly about what MIT is doing well around
this, and then maybe turn this into an open question about what we feel
like the universities that we know and love, whether we're at them now or
whether a proud Hampshire grad, what these can be doing to sort of
transform and work in solidarity with this movement. But Jessica, I'm
going to ask you first if you can. So, that was a high hard one there that
was. I more lobbed what I was going to Joy, but it's hard when you're sitting.
>> JESSICA: Do I speak into?
>> ETHAN: Just speak.
>> JESSICA: Hi. I'm Jessica from the MIT admissions office, and first I just want to
thank all of you for sharing your experiences and stories. They are
incredibly humbling and inspiring for all of us to hear, so I do want to
thank you all. As for what we're doing at MIT, MIT is one of the five
schools in the country that offers need-blind admissions, need-based
financial aid, and full-need financial aid to students regardless of
citizenship. Again, that's one of five in this country. There are other
private institutions. Some of the institutions you all named. Private
institutions, some state institutions that will provide financial aid to
undocumented students or a DACAmented student, but the rules around
this are pretty inconsistent. It can be really hard to navigate and find this
information. So, as you can imagine, there are a lot of questions that
undocumented students have to think about that other students don't
have to think about as they're navigating the college application process.
So, the media lab has collaborated with us over the last few months to
think about ways that we can mobilize resources at MIT and around
Boston to serve local undocumented students. Obviously, Boston is a
place that's really rich in educational resources. There are so many
educational institutions in the area. So, we've been trying to think about
how can we, how can we serve this population here in Boston and in the
greater Boston area. Some of the broad goals that I have for the work
that we're doing together is to mobilize resources at MIT, to build a
network in the greater Boston area, and to boost visibility around these
movements and these resources. So, we've been collaborating with local
organizations like the Student Immigrant Movement, which is a activist
organization that serves undocumented students in local high schools.
We've been working with Unafraid Educators, which is a part of the
Boston Teachers' Union, which mobilized educators to support
undocumented students. A program that we're putting on, or working
with the Boston Teachers' Union to put on, is a guidance counselor
training. They're hosting a day-long training for their guidance
counselors in Boston public schools. We're working with them to host a
discussion and panel around serving undocumented students, working
with an immigration to talk about what are the options for students,
working with guidance counselors and student activists to talk about
their journeys through the, through education and what are the options
for students, and increasing some visibility around these issues,
knowledge around these issues, so that those guidance counselors are
then better-empowered to work with the students in their schools.
>> ETHAN: And sort of three big ideas came up when we were talking
earlier today. One was looking at guidance counselors a real point of
impact on this. It was really interesting to hear both of you sort of talk
about not getting terrific guidance from you high school guidance
counselors about where to go and sort of how to go with this. A second
point, and I thought this was particularly interesting, is that Chris
Peterson, a friend of many of ours in this room, talks about the fact that
he often ends up seeing applications from people, sometimes
undocumented, sometimes similarly students who just didn't have as
much of a chance in high school as some of us did, who clearly would
be right for MIT had they taken the classes they needed to get into a
place like MIT. And so there becomes this really interesting challenge of
for those of us here who are grad students, for those who are
undergrads, is there a way that we could be involved in sort of reaching
out to populations who could have the opportunity to be here, have this
amazing opportunity to be here, need-blind, citizenship-blind, if they had
the qualifications. And then the third that I was really blown away by was
this realization that in the same way that your movement was building
everything from Teamsters trying to figure out how to drive people there
to people protecting and people thinking about, but lawyers. We need
lawyers. We need to help support students and their families when
they're going through these issues, even if the students are fully
documented, but their in a mixed family, that becomes, imagine the level
of stress if you find yourself simultaneously trying to manage an MIT
course load and possibly being the only person in your house who's
bilingual, helping your parents try to figure out how to stay in the country.
For all of you, and we'll have this as the last question, what should
universities be doing more of? What can we do better at MIT, and what
can we push other universities that we love and care about to do better on on this issue?
>> GUSTAVO: I think probably the thing that I haven't seen, because, you know,
I've seen schools add another tap on their website that's
information for undocumented students. Right? And the
way that I see it, there's two sides. One side is the undocumented
students looking to go to college. The other one is the universities.
Right? And there's a few universities that say, "Yeah. We have some
resources, but," and something you had asked earlier like, who could be
against students learning. Right? You'd be surprised. A lot of people. A
lot of people can be against that and are against that, and that shows,
between those two sides, those are the people that are blocking access
to those resources, and so I think more so than just adding another tab,
more so than just creating a pamphlet, I think you need to be actively
recruiting undocumented students because the same way that you
actively recruit other students who have a breadth of knowledge based
on their lived experiences, we also have something to contribute, and
going back to your question about the biases that are written inherently
into the system, I think that's where these knowledges, these systems of
knowledge that we have derived from our lived experiences from our
contacts, not just with government, but with state institutions of all
kinds, I think we can bring those into this place, and we can make good
things with it. But, I think, again, you need to be able to step above and
step beyond those people that are trying to block the access by actively
recruiting and being public about it, because not a lot of places are
public about their admissions policies when it comes to undocumented
students and when it comes to financial aid. And so I think that once you
become more visible to the students who are already taking huge risk by
becoming visible themselves I think that's the very first step that you can take.
>> KEISH: Completely agree. That's so important. That is so important.
I the that's what lacking at Harvard. Honestly though, the is a
really interesting audience for me to speak to because oftentimes, the
things that we have to highlight is, I mean we are already in, I'm part of
Harvard, and we're at MIT. It's already a very prestigious. You guys have a
lot of funding and we're oftentimes talking to community college, like
students who can't even go to afford community college. So, recognizing
that. Recognizing that. Right? Recognizing that. I think Gustavo's point is
really, really important for these -- institutions and private institutions
who do have the funding to step it up. So, one thing, one sad thing to
recognize is that once Nancy Cantor, the Syracuse chancellor left, and
we had an administrator change, they stopped funding undocumented
students. So, they stopped receiving undocumented students through
their private grant. So, that's another avenue that's been closed. And a lot
of the things that I pushed while I was there was to go public, but there
was resistance to that. So, recognizing, and also recognizing the labor of
Lorgia, who's not here, and all the faculties who are here, there was a lot
of risks, a lot of labor, a lot of time that they put in on top of their
obligation, as the only Ethnic Studies professor at UGA. The only woman
of color. One of the few who have like how many students that they're
advising that they had opened up their space to dedicate their time to
make a space for Freedom University. I think that needs to happen at
MIT. I think that needs to happen at Harvard. I think there needs to be a
step up of investment, a coalition building, and a little bit more of
courage to contest and to stop telling us what the rules of how complex
these bureaucratic and academic institutions and red tapes are. We
already know that there are red tapes.
[Laughing.]
>> KEISH: We're asking you to step up. Administrators need to step up.
Students and grad students need to step up. I think one of the most disheartening
things that I've actually experienced organizing at Harvard has been this
constant separation between undergraduates and graduate students.
So, undocumented students. I'm still undocumented. I'm in the graduate
program, but there's been a constant separation between the investment
within the needs of undergraduate students and graduate students, and
our needs are different, but they're still the same. Like, what does it
mean to bring in undocumented students as graduate students? What
does it mean for them to be teaching fellows when they don't have
DACA?These questions need to be asked and the only ways you're
going to get answers on the inside is as Gustavo says. Center and invite
undocumented students and actually hear what their needs are and
advocating for them.
>> GUSTAVO: Is there still a lot of anxieties that even
someone who might have the perfect GPA and might have the
extracurriculars. There's a lot of anxiety because you just don't know.
You don't know. And I think that part of being public would also work on
this other front that I think has been very, very lacking, and I don't know if
people have actually thought about it or brought it up, but shaming these
other institutions into coming and living in the present, right, not staying
in the past, not staying in this way of thinking where OK education still
needs to be segregated somehow because that makes us feel like we
still have power over the systems that be. Right? And I think that a place
like MIT, with the clout that it has, and if it starts being public, and if it
starts actively recruiting undocumented students, I think that can also
have a domino effect or a shaming effect upon these other big
institutions to step it up themselves because if there's anything that I
learned about higher education is that no institution wants to fall behind another institution.
>> ETHAN: So, one of the things we talked about a little bit over lunch was the ways in which
MIT will often do things right, but very quietly.
And this is a place where we're doing things right. We
are by being need-blind and by being citizenship-blind, that's the right step.
We need to go a step further, and we need to be open and affirming about this.
I will openly affirm that I welcome and encourage
undocumented students to apply to my group here at the media lab. I
hope that others will do that as well. But beyond that, this is something
that we as MIT should have a lot of pride in. We should actually be
talking up and actively recruiting around on a bunch of different
>> I think all of us who inhabit more secure positions in these institutions
need to help shift the perspective and make clear that there is not a
neutral space. When what you're seeing, people like y'all, are carrying the
brunt of 40 years of deliberate constriction of access to higher
education in this country, and you can either counteract that process, or
you can simply shrug your shoulders and enable it. But there's not
actually, there's no moment where it holds still. This was a deliberate
political move to make it harder for that vast expansion of education.
Everyone had a full ride in California in 1960 if they could get into
college. Right? And that's no longer how we do that because it stopped
being simply available to white Americans, and that was a moment
where it started to contract. And any of us who work in these institutions
owe it to the people who are taking the heat to figure out where our
institution is in that history and what steps we can take from within to counteract that.
>> ETHAN: I'm going to give the last word to Betina, and then we're going to
welcome anyone who wants to stick around. We're going
to go and have a smaller discussion over in my space in Civic. But Betina, please.
>> BETINA: Yeah. I just want to support what Gustavo and Keish
were saying, and I want to add to that that undocumented
students are not a risk for an institution. They are the best. They bring in
a lot of experience, and they turn out staying in college. In Ulead Athens,
we had helped around 50 students to get into college. From those 50, as
far as I know, only one left. All of them are in school. They are continuing
struggling. Some are them are taking two classes per semester, three
classes per semester. But, they don't withdraw, and I think that is
something that all colleges need to have into account. They are more
secure than other students that might not finish, might not end up graduating.
>> ETHAN: So, I just want to thank my guests for coming out, talking about these issues.
I just want to congratulate you all for the incredible work that Freedom University has done.
I want to thank everyone who came out of the audience,
everyone who's watching us online. We're going to continue this conversation.
We're hoping to have a very practical conversation about what we
can do better here in Boston for people who are still engaged with us.
Come on over to the Civic space. We'll be there in a couple of minutes,
but thank you all for coming out and being part of this.